Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled

Latinx Futurism in Smoking Mirror Blues

Micah Donohue, Eastern New Mexico University

Abstract: This essay, through a reading of Ernest Hogan’s Smoking

Mirror Blues (2001), challenges the entrenched subordination of fantasy
and supernatural to the supposed rationality of science fiction. It explores
how Chicanx and Latinx futurisms, of which Hogan’s novel provides an
exemplary text, reimagine the present as a world that no longer adheres to
or is strictly determined by the tenets of western rationalism and scientific
thought. Smoking Mirror Blues opposes a strictly scientific way of looking at
and understanding (organizing and hierarchizing) reality that has roots in
the racist and patriarchal histories of modernity and colonialism. Drawing
on the groundbreaking work of Catherine S. Ramírez, Cathryn Josefina
Merla-Watson, B. V. Olguín, and other scholars of Latinx futurism, I argue
that Hogan’s novel twists the scientific and the supernatural together into a
Möbius-like strip, not only to exemplify the combinatorial poetics of Latinx
futurism, but to demonstrate through that fusion the emancipatory poten-
tial of what Merla-Watson and Olguín call “the Latin@ speculative arts.”
The recombinatorial nature of Hogan’s novel, and Latinx futurism in gen-
eral, has ethical as well as aesthetic significance. Smoking Mirror Blues aligns
with and, I claim, can be productively studied through the Latin American
philosopher Enrique Dussel’s transmodern ethics of liberation.

Keywords: Ernest Hogan, Smoking Mirror Blues, Latinx futurism,

science fiction, fantasy

The 2019 Escape Velocity conference, organized by the Museum of Science Fiction,
and held in Washington, DC, included a roundtable discussion about the role of the
supernatural in science fiction.1 The panelists focused on how Afrofuturist writers like
Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and NK Jemisin combined tropes
from science-fictional, fantastic, and Gothic imaginaries in works such as Butler’s
Dawn (1987), Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Okorafor’s Binti (2015),
and Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017). The discussion turned at one point
to Darko Suvin’s tired but still influential distinction between science fiction (sf) and

1. The panel was titled “The Supernatural in SF Literature (Nalo Hopkinson, NK Jemisin, Nnedi
Okorafor)” and took place on 25 May 2019. The abstract can be found at escapevelocity2019.sched
.com/event/MFXy/the-supernatural-in-sf-literature-nalo-hopkinson-nk-jemisin-nnedi-okorafor.

Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1, pp. 5–23

Copyright © 2020 Trustees of Indiana University • doi:10.2979/chiricu.5.1.02
6 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

fantasy in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). Where sf is cognitively estranging,

offering “a better vantage point from which to comprehend” and transform “human
relations,” fantasy, the Gothic, fairytales, and similar story forms all too often express
ideological backwardness and reactionary tendencies.2 Suvin draws a distinction
between sf and fantasy that ultimately depends on western paradigms of knowledge —
“science”—complicit in the racist violence of colonialism and its legacies so actively
contested in Afrofuturist works.3 As the panelists noted, in the spirit of Isiah Lavender
III’s imperative to address “race and racism” in sf scholarship (10), Afrofuturism
challenges the hegemony of western knowledge. It trespasses the hierarchizing line
between the supernatural and the scientific that divides so much sf criticism.
In this essay, I shift from considering the supernatural in Afrofuturism to
Latinx futurism, which has always been in allied and constructive dialogue with
Afrofuturism. When Catherine S. Ramírez coined “Chicanafuturism” to describe
the cyber-traditional, scientific, and supernatural artwork of Marion C. Martinez
(and the cultural productions of Chicanx borderlands authors and artists more
generally), she did so with Alondra Nelson’s pathbreaking work on Afrofuturism
in mind.4 And when Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson introduced the term “Latin@
futurism” in “The Altermundos of Latin@futurism” (2017), she described her
work as a development of Ramírez’s and Nelson’s ideas.5 In particular, all three share
a vision of the future and past converging in the utopian possibility to reimagine
the present as a world no longer conforming to heteronormative, patriarchal, and
white supremacist patterns of thought. Afrofuturist and Latinx futurist artists see

2. The ongoing relevance of Suvin’s position can be traced in work by renowned sf critics Carl
Freedman and Fredric Jameson, among others. In Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), Freed-
man “sharply distinguishes science fiction from the irrationalist estrangements of fantasy or Gothic
literature (which may secretly work to ratify the mundane status quo by presenting no alternative to
the latter other inexplicable discontinuities)” (xvi–xvii). Jameson, meanwhile, claims in Archaeologies
of the Future (2007) that it is “the absence of any sense of history that most sharply differentiates fan-
tasy from Science Fiction” (61). What triangulates the three critics (who, it goes without saying, have
made invaluable, pathbreaking contributions to utopian and sf studies) is their aligning—and hierar-
chizing—sf with history, critique, and theory, and fantasy with pop culture, escapism, and book sales.
3. The links between colonialism and knowledge-production as (irrefutable, “true”) science are
so well established that mainstream publications like Smithsonian Magazine acknowledge them.
See, for example, Rohan Deb Roy’s quite good article “Science Still Bears the Fingerprints of
Colonialism,” 9 Apr. 2018, www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-bears-fingerprints
-colonialism-180968709/. Afrofuturism and Latinx futurism, too, as we shall see, contest colonial
modernity’s hegemonic claims to, and classifications of, “science” and “knowledge.”
4. In “Deus Ex Machina: Tradition, Technology, and the Chicanafuturist Art of Marion C. Mar-
tinez” (2004), and again in “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin” (2008), Ramírez under-
scores the relationships between Afrofuturism and Chicanafuturism and highlights the importance
of Nelson’s work on Afrofuturism to her own thinking.
5. Throughout this essay I use the nonbinary terms “Latinx” and “Chicanx” unless I am citing
someone else’s work, in which case I preserve the term used by the author(s).
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 7

(and represent) the world through a post-Duboisian “double vision” of converging

temporalities that defies strictly scientific explanation.6 The necromantic vision of
the past as prophecy as well as present that Ishmael Reed has articulated (Dick
and Singh 16), or the recombinatorial “visions” from which Ernest Hogan has
fashioned his “chicanonautica,” rasquache aesthetics (“Manifesto” 408), cannot be
discussed—except reductively—in solely rational terms. Hogan characterizes his
writing as a “bubbling cauldron of recombocultural imagination” (408), a witch’s
brew in which the scientific and the supernatural blend into each other—as they
so often do in Afrofuturist and Latinx futurist literature.
Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues (2001), a foundational work of US-Mexican
borderlands sf, exemplifies the traversability of the porous boundaries between
the rational and the fantastic in Latinx futurism.7 That traversability, a hallmark of
sf and Latinx futurism, is also central to the ethical importance of Hogan’s novel: it
articulates a transmodern, heterotopic lifeworld in nonscientific/rational (or not
exclusively scientific/rational) terms. When the novel describes one of its princi-
pal characters as a “neomythical recombocultural chimera” (6), it sketches an apt
self-portrait. This essay aims to survey and chart the constantly shifting boundar-
ies between, and the constantly combining and metamorphosing tropes of, fan-
tasy and sf in the story worlds of Latinx futurism. Through its consummate world
building, and intricate blending of the supernatural and the scientific, Hogan’s
novel foregrounds and exemplifies how Latinx futurism transcends (more in the
sense of Anzaldúa than Hegel) supposed generic, cognitive, and ontological dis-
tinctions in order to recombine them in new aesthetic processes and modes of
interpretation. In Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa discusses how
mestiza consciousness overcomes dualities that are represented, in a transcended
and reconfigured state, “through the images” of the Latinx artist’s work (102). The
combinatorial and rasquache poetics of Latinx futurism (symbolized by Hogan’s
“bubbling cauldron,” itself an image that can be connected to what Anzaldúa
describes) superimpose and overcome—transcend—the distinctions between sf
and fantasy to imagine new worlds emerging from culturally specific histories.

6. For W. E. B. Du Bois’s discussion of “double consciousness,” which he likens to a double (or

doubled) vision, see “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). The “double
vision” discussed above can also be productively connected to the “plural personality” (and atten-
dant, multiple ways of seeing) that Gloria Anzaldúa describes as part of “la conciencia de la mestiza”
in Borderlands/La Frontera (101).
7. Although Smoking Mirror Blues is frequently mentioned in discussions of Latinx futurism and bor-
derlands science fiction (Emily A. Maguire cites it in her essay “Science Fiction” in The Routledge Com-
panion to Latino/a Literature [2013], for example), there have been only a few sustained critical readings
of the novel to date. These include Daoine S. Bachran’s “From Code to Codex: Tricksterizing the Digital
Divide in Ernest Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues (2015, reprinted in Altermundos, 2017) and Elsa del
Campo Ramírez’s “Postethnicity and Antiglobalizaton in Chicana/o Science Fiction: Ernest Hogan’s
Smoking Mirror Blues, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s Lunar Braceros, 2125–2148” (2018).
8 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

This newness accords with the liberating potential that Cathryn Josefina Merla-
Watson and B. V. Olguín identify “within the Latin@ speculative arts” to transcend
the world’s myriad forms of racial, sexual, economic, and ecological violence (32).
Neither new worlds nor freedom from old—oppressive—modes of being are
possible, however, without new ways of looking at, understanding, and shaping
existing social structures and established modes of thought. Smoking Mirror Blues
dramatizes that transformative change in perspective—its title is both an obscur-
ing play of reflections and a play on “el espejo humeante del dios azteca de la noche,
Tezcatlipoca” [the smoking mirror of the Aztec god of the night, Tezcatlipoca], as
Carlos Fuentes writes in El espejo enterrado (17). Tezcatlipoca incarnates within
Smoking Mirror Blues, possessing the body of Beto Orozco, the novel’s ill-fated pro-
tagonist, and taking control of the internet. In portraying Tezcatlipoca, the novel
refuses to finally offer any resolution to another character’s bewildered question:
“Is this supernatural?” (153). Instead, it resorts to an enigmatic, most occult utter-
ance: “Sci-fi ain’t nothing but mojo misspelled” (205). In that utterance, Arthur
C. Clarke’s maxim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic” (“Clarke’s Third Law” 22) comes undone. Clarke’s statement cele-
brates the endless progress of western science (never mind its entwined histories
of racism and colonialism), and it assumes all “magic” either can be dismissed as
baseless superstition or can finally be explained technologically. By contrast, in
Hogan’s novel, and in Latinx futurism more generally, the supernatural and the sci-
entific are twisted together into a Möbius-like strip that neither negates nor privi-
leges one over the other but creates instead a dynamic, fluid circuit in which sf and
fantasy, past and future continually recombine and recreate each other.
The “recombocultural” nature of Latinx futurism has more than aesthetic sig-
nificance, as has already been implied. In the next section of this essay, I discuss in
greater detail the ethical significance of those recombinations. The interweaving
of languages, lifeworlds, and histories marginalized in the self-telling of western
modernity’s hegemony, as the means to contest and ultimately bury that racially,
sexually, and ecologically disastrous narrative, aligns Latinx futurism with the
transmodern ethics of liberation formulated by the Argentinean-Mexican philos-
opher Enrique Dussel. Analysis of these points of contact, the building blocks of
bridges toward future worlds, segues into the essay’s final section. There, I read
select passages from Smoking Mirror Blues to illustrate the convergence of the
supernatural and the scientific in Latinx futurism. The neomythical chimeras and
cybernetic Aztec gods emerging from that fusion embody the emancipatory, trans-
formative, and ethical power of Latinx futurism.
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 9

Recombinations, Latinx Futurism, and Liberating Ethics

Recombo culture has been part of the Chicanx (and more broadly Latinx) liter-
ary aesthetic since Corky Gonzales transformed the eponymous Joaquín into a
vortex-like microcosm of Mexican and Mexican American history, a whirling—
worlding—figure in which the shades of Cortés and Nezahualcóyotl spin cease-
lessly across the scarred but fertile cultural terrain of the US-Mexican borderlands.
Recombinations structure the cosmo-poetics of Rodolfo Anaya, whose novels
(most notably, but not exclusively, Bless Me, Ultima) imagine new mythologies
and subjectivities for the wind-swept Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains of New
Mexico. In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa depicts recombination in
spiritual and poetic terms when she invokes Coatlicue to symbolize “the fusion
of opposites” in mestiza consciousness (69). For performance artist and poet
Guillermo Gómez-Peña, recombination leads to
incredible mixtures beyond science fiction:
cholo-punks, pachuco krishnas,
Irish concheros, butoh rappers, cyber-Aztecs
Gringofarians, Hopi rockers, y demás… (“Freefalling” 1)

Sandra Cisneros interweaves recombination into the “interlocking and double-

looping” threads of the elaborately fringed rebozos that the women in Caramelo
(2002) make, and through that making (a poiesis), they tell and recreate their
history as new stories. Tying these and still other examples together is the way
Latinx literature has continually—and strategically—combined existing story
forms, languages, and histories to reflect critically on the present and, in Cisneros’s
words, “make it all right in the end” (428). The recombinations of Latinx literature
demonstrate a utopian desire to transform the world that is an essential compo-
nent of Latinx futurism.
The same year that Cisneros published Caramelo, Alondra Nelson intro-
duced the volume of Social Text that firmly established Afrofuturism as a subject
of scholarly inquiry. In her essay, Nelson adopts—and adapts—Ishmael Reed’s
necromantic past-as-future writing to formulate her own view of Afrofuturism
as a recombinatorial rejection of the racism seething within neoliberal ideals of
technological progress. Her necromantic but profoundly vital formulation would
deeply influence Catherine S. Ramírez’s definition of “Chicanafuturism” two years
later:
Chicano cultural production that attends to cultural transformations
resulting from new and everyday technologies (including its detritus); that
excavates and creates original narratives of identity, technology, and the
future; that offers critiques of the promises of science and technology; and
that redefines humanism and/or the human. [Chicanafuturism] does not
10 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

privilege science and reason over religion and spirituality. Instead it merges
them and, thus, offers an ontological and epistemological alternative to that of
the Enlightenment (i.e., rational) subject. (“Ghost in the Machine” 5, my
emphasis)

At the same time as Ramírez articulates a recombinatorial—highly critical—

aesthetic that fuses times, technologies, and histories together, she also “merges”
the scientific and the supernatural into an “alternative” cognitive paradigm that
contests the hegemonic grip of western rationality on knowledge and subjectivity.
Ramírez poses an anticolonial challenge that demands an utter revalorization of
knowledge—what, in a Foucauldian sense, “counts” as knowledge—that would
transform our way of seeing and knowing (and so being in) the world. The stakes of
Ramírez’s essay are precisely those of being, the ability, that is, to compose “original
narratives of identity” not restricted by onto-epistemological models of colonial
modernity.
Merla-Watson completes a futurist triptych, adding “Latin@futurism” to the
discussion. She considers explicitly in terms of genre what Ramírez had discussed
vis-à-vis epistemology and ontology. In “The Altermundos of Latin@futurism,”
Merla-Watson writes that Latinx futurist “texts often blend speculative genres, such
as sci-fi, fantasy, horror” in order to “create new, hybrid forms reflective of cultural
mestizaje.” The result of these blendings is a “new mestiz@ aesthetics” that “stitches
together” disparate tropes, plotlines, and imaginaries to animate a Frankensteinian
“body who insistently questions mastery and social power.” Latinx futurism con-
tests dominant (oppressive) sociocultural paradigms from the “margins,” and
Merla-Watson spotlights Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008) as exemplifying
how Latinx futurism fashions “emancipatory imaginings” that “reckon with the
past.” Hogan’s novels, too, demand such recombinatorial and ethical reckoning. He
describes Cortez on Jupiter (1990), High Aztech (1992), and Smoking Mirror Blues
as “rasquache mash-ups” that blend together literary currents streaming “across bor-
ders” and from “barrios all over the planet” (“Manifesto” 406). For Hogan, as for
Merla-Watson, Ramírez, and Nelson, the point of these multitemporal, planetary
mash-ups is finally an ethical and utopian one. “Things need to be shaken up. We
need never-ending revolution,” writes Hogan (“Manifesto” 408). That call to shake
things up is simultaneously a call to break down and transform existing social and
cognitive structures that are oppressive and violent. It is an appeal that reverberates
throughout Latinx and Afrofuturist literature, connecting what Shelley Streeby has
termed “Indigenous and people of color futurisms” to Enrique Dussel’s “ética de la
liberación” via the utopian desire common to them all (Streeby 30).8

8. By “utopian,” here and throughout this essay, I do not mean unachievable castles in the air or
similar fata morgana; rather, I use “utopian” in the hopeful, emancipatory, and socially transforma-
tive sense that Ernst Bloch articulates in The Principle of Hope (1986). This is the kind of utopia
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 11

It would be impossible to summarize here the decades of scholarly work that

Dussel has done in the fields of ethics, philosophy, history, theology, Marxism,
modernism, postcolonialism, and others. Michael R. Paradiso-Michau captures
the genre-crossing expansiveness of Dussel’s work: “the writings and teachings
of Argentine-Mexican thinker Enrique Dussel (1934–) traverse and transgress
boundaries, geographic and intellectual, political and religious” (2). That is to say,
in the context of this essay, Dussel’s “writings and teachings” are recombocultural,
and he has spent his career articulating an ethics of liberation that draws from and
recombines the local and global into Latin American points of origin for future,
more humane worlds. But perhaps the best characterization of Dussel’s work is his
own description of Marx’s commitment to the “ejercicio de la razón ético-utópico”
(Ética 325). Dussel’s exercise of ethical utopian reason animates all of his texts,
galvanizing early publications such as Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana
(1973) and providing the critical-transformative impetus for more recent texts like
16 Tesis de economía política (2014) and 14 Tesis de ética (2016).
Arguably the best example of Dussel’s ethical utopianism is to be found in
his concept of transmodernity (“trans-modernidad”), a focal point in his work
where ethics, utopia, critique, and liberation converge. Although Dussel discusses
transmodernity in many of his books and essays, he gives the clearest and most
succinct description of it in “Transmodernidad e interculturalidad” (2004). First,
the transmodern project (“proyecto trans-moderno”), which is oriented toward
the construction of a “utopía trans-moderna,” takes the blueprints and building
materials for that new society from communities (Indigenous cultures, for exam-
ple, and people of color) that have been marginalized and oppressed by modernity.
Second, the values (“valores”) of those groups, which have resisted the destructive
homogenization of modernity for centuries, furnish the occasion for a double cri-
tique: of modernism, in its current socioeconomic guise of neoliberal capitalism,
and of the group itself, “una crítica interna” (an internal critique) meant to demol-
ish imposed models of social life and begin outlining their (nonwestern, noncap-
italistic) replacements. Third, and of particular importance for this essay, Dussel
locates the emergence of such critiques—or at least the possibility of their emer-
gence—in literal and figurative borderlands (“Transmodernidad” 25).
Here, Dussel echoes Walter Mignolo’s concept of “border gnosis,” an “episte-
mology of exteriority” that Mignolo based on the “Chicana/o experience” in the
US-Mexican borderlands (Mignolo and Tlostanova 206; Mignolo 6). Border gno-
sis works to replace “hegemonic forms of knowledge” with subaltern perspectives

Merla-Watson and Olguín refer to in the introduction to Altermundos, when they write that “Latin@
sci-fi and the speculative arts—even the most bleak, terrifying, and dystopic—project a utopian spir-
it through the genre’s capacity for incisive social critique that cuts to the bone of our shared pasts and
presents” (6).
12 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

(Mignolo 12), a substitution with socially transformative and, Dussel has written,
utopian consequences: “Todo proceso de liberación es un movimento de construc-
ción de la utopía” [every process of liberation is movement in the construction of
utopia] (16 Tesis 400). While Dussel does not explicitly invoke the US-Mexican
borderlands or Chicanx history, as Mignolo does, his claim that transmodern criti-
cism results in “una renovada cultura no sólo descolonizada sino novedosa” [a ren-
ovated culture not only decolonized but new] draws on and reinforces Mignolo’s
theories (“Transmodernidad” 25; Mignolo 12). Moreover, the utopian impulse
in both Dussel’s transmodernism and Mignolo’s border gnosis resonates with the
energy coursing through descriptions of the borderlands by Latinx authors such as
Anzaldúa and Hogan.
Anzaldúa describes the Mexico-US border as a “locus of resistance, of rupture
…, and of putting together the fragments and creating a new assemblage. For me,”
she goes on, “this process is represented by Coatlicue’s daughter, Coyolxauhqui,
la diosa de la luna.” But she also likens the borderlands in the same essay, “Border
Arte,” to Nepantla, “the Nahuatl word for an in-between state,” a transitional place
(“lugar”) of transformation; and Anzaldúa compares the frontera to “Jorge Luis
Borges’s Aleph, the one spot on earth containing all others within it” (49, 56, 57).
Anzaldúa dramatizes the very thing she describes: a “new assemblage” that recom-
bines myriad fragments—of languages, cultures, histories, even genres (as poetry
and prose mix within her essay as so often happens in Anzaldúa’s writings)—and,
in doing so, provides an example of the transmodern utopia that Dussel imagi-
nes. Anzaldúa’s Nahautl-Spanish-English, Chicanx-Mexican-Indigenous-(Latin)
American assemblage is, Hogan would write, a “recombocultural chimera,” the
“neomythical” embodiment of the renovated culture that constitutes the ultimate
objective of Dussel’s ethical utopian reason.
The point I want to make, here, is that the four constitutive elements of trans-
modernity—its “exteriority” to the racist and oppressive histories of modernism;
its emphasis on critique; its celebration of borderlands thought; and its commit-
ment to the creation of nonwestern (i.e., noncapitalist, modernist, colonial) life-
worlds—are foundational to the ethical-utopian aspirations of Latinx futurism
as well. In particular, Dussel’s theories mirror the temporal conjugations and the
(sought after and fought for) epistemological transformations of Latinx futurism.
Merla-Watson and Olguín write in the introduction to the seminal Altermundos:
Latin@ Speculative Literature, Film, and Popular Culture (2017) that “we cannot
imagine our collective futures without reckoning with the hoary ghosts of coloni-
alism and modernity that continue to exert force through globalization and neo-
liberal capitalism” (4). That “reckoning” is simultaneously a social critique and a
utopian projection, the two scholars write, in which “the real and the unreal, fiction
and truth, natural and supernatural blend” (6–9). Not surprisingly, Merla-Watson
and Olguín turn to Hogan’s work later in their introduction for an example of
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 13

such blending (27). Novels like High Aztech and Smoking Mirror Blues combine
the supernatural and the scientific and by doing so construct ethical alter-worlds
infused with the hope of Dussel’s transmodern utopianism.
Renowned borderlands sf critic Lysa Rivera underlines the ethical dimensions
of Hogan’s recombinations in “Mestizaje and Heterotopia in Ernest Hogan’s High
Aztech” (2014), an essay that reads Hogan’s perhaps best-known novel as “a sci-
ence-fictional allegory for colonial history in Mexico” and as a symbol for cultural
“mestizaje (hybridity)” (152). “Hogan’s novel,” Rivera writes, “resists notions of
cultural, racial, and linguistic purity,” and instead imagines “cultural collision and
intermixing” in ways that do not privilege (or even preserve) modern paradigms of
identity or knowledge (157). An observation of Xólotl Zapata, protagonist of High
Aztech—and reader of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo—captures this “intermix-
ing.” Gazing into the feverish Mexico City night, Xólotl sees “nighttime chichime
demons [grow] sci-fi attributes”; he marvels that the “mythologies of past and
present were merging into the reality of [his] present” (69). At stake in this inter-
mixing, blending, or recombining of sf and fantasy, history and myth, and local
(Mexican-Aztecan) and foreign (Euro-American) cultural traditions is Xólotl’s
future. Rivera is certainly right that the novel is an allegory of colonial history, but
it is also a parable of an anticolonial, transmodern world to come—just as Smoking
Mirror Blues is. Both novels absolutely refuse the homogenizing structures of
knowledge (and knowledge-making) that modernism has sought to destructively
impose in its juggernaut-like rush toward universality. High Aztech and Smoking
Mirror Blues envision instead heterotopic (Dussel would write “pluriversal”)
societies and futures organized around Dussel’s transmodern utopianism, Merla-
Watson’s “emancipatory imaginings,” and Ramírez’s “epistemological alternatives”
to the strictures of modernist thought.

Magic and Science (Fiction): Smoking Mirror Blues

In the afterword to Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (2009), China
Miéville argues that the “sharp distinction” that critics such as Suvin, Freedman,
and Jameson have drawn between sf and fantasy “is untenable” (232). The author
of Perdido Street Station (2000)—a behemoth of a novel that sprawls across
science-fictional and fantasy imaginaries—insists “that the embedded condescen-
sion and even despite” of this “paradigm,” a paradigm that celebrates (western)
reason over (primitive/foreign) magic, exist “as perhaps the major obstruction
to theoretical progress in the field” of sf and fantasy studies (232). These claims
14 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

echo, although unfortunately no dialogue occurs with, the similar arguments of

Hogan and other authors that the “rasquache mash-ups” of Latinx futurism smash
together and obliterate the very distinctions Miéville is—rightly—calling to undo.
Such distinctions fall apart in Hogan’s novels, but they also disappear or are pro-
foundly challenged by a host of other Latinx writers, artists, and filmmakers.9 Their
works demonstrate that the “speculative” in “Latin@ speculative arts” resides “in
the interstices of genres” (Merla-Watson and Olguín 2). Smoking Mirror Blues
makes particularly evident, and so I read it as an exemplary text within the Latinx
futurist universe, how sf and futurism converge within Latinx futurism to imagina-
ble alter-worlds (“altermundos”) that are “based on premises of equality and social
justice,” and not on the premises of social inequality that have determined much of
American history since colonialism (Calvo-Quirós 39).
The plot of Smoking Mirror Blues unfolds during “Dead Daze,” a cyber-
punk reimagining and recombocultural amalgamation of Halloween, Día de los
Muertos, Mardi Gras, Carnival, and a frenzied, drug-fueled rave on the streets of
“El Lay,” tomorrow’s Los Angeles. Hogan’s choice of setting emphasizes the already
incredibly recombocultural and rasquache nature of LA, but it also highlights the
recombinatorial nature of a near future in which cultural, linguistic, historical, and
aesthetics mash-ups have become an essential part of everyday life. But complicat-
ing matters is Smoking Mirror Blues’ narrative awareness that re-creation is as cru-
cial to the sustainability of late capitalism as it is to programs of resistance against
the former’s myriad forms of oppression, which range in scale from the individual
to the planetary. Thus Elsa del Campo Ramírez is right to claim that Blues “fanta-
sizes about the engulfing of cultural and racial traits by an ever-craving capitalist
monster” (387), but she overlooks how recombination and reinvention, the very
things the capitalist monster craves, are allegorically instrumentalized into forms
of marked resistance to that monster through the incarnation of the trickster god
Tezcatlipoca and, in more ambivalent ways, the actions of the human characters
in Blues.10
Beto Orozco, a VR game designer and the novel’s protagonist, steals a computer
program that he cowrote with Xochitl Echaurren, a Mexican software designer and
his former lover. The program was designed to “simulate” divine beings: in this

9. See, inter alia, Alejandro Morales’s The Rag Doll Plagues (1992), Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s
Friendly Cannibals (1996), the artwork of Marion C. Martinez (about which Ramírez has written so
profoundly), Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer (2008), Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s novel Lunar
Braceros, 2125–2148 (2009), and Sabrina Vourvuolias’s Ink (2012).
10. This doubling, in which the same figure, trope, device, and so on, can simultaneously operate
as an instrument of both oppression and emancipation can be seen in other works of Latinx futurism.
Often materialized in various forms of technology, this ambivalent, even contradictory doubling is
evident in Hogan’s High Aztech as well as in Sánchez and Pita’s Lunar Braceros and Rivera’s Sleep
Dealer.
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 15

case Tezcatlipoca, “the supreme deity of the Late Postclassic Aztec Pantheon,” a
god who “crosses spatial and mythical boundaries, as a truly shaman-like trans-
formative figure” (Saunders and Baquedano 1–2). The only copy of the program
is stored on a nanochip, which Beto has taken. When he slots the chip in his com-
puter, the code performs millions of binary incantations at the speed of light,
bringing “Tezcatlipoca to a new kind of life” as a virtual figure in the world wide
web of the near future (Blues 13). Gods, though, trouble distinctions between the
virtual and real, and Tezcatlipoca is neither amused nor impressed by technology’s
attempt to confine him to one plane of existence. Immediately after Beto runs the
program, Tezcatlipoca, irked at being “imprisoned” in a “disembodied, electronic
form” (22), takes possession of the “sorcerer” who has electronically summoned
him. (Instead of clarifying whether Tezcatlipoca is the real god of the Smoking
Mirror, or merely a superb copy, Blues leaves the matter shrouded in mystery, an
ambiguity with generic implications that we return to below.) Once in control of
Beto, Tezcatlipoca immediately begins to re-create the world in his image, using
his human avatar and his omnipresence in the “mediasphere” (the internet) to
transform the minds and lives of those around him. Again, Blues mires itself in
contradictions, as Daoine S. Bachran has insightfully discussed. She notes that, at
the same time as Blues “invokes Mesoamerican, specifically Aztec mythology and
imagery to rupture the codes of technologized racism,” a rupturing very much in
the spirit of Nelson’s Afrofuturism, the novel also “re-creates patriarchal essential-
ism without critiquing it” (112, 125). Bachran’s observation calls attention to how
insidiously persistent ways of perceiving the world can be, and Hogan’s novel inad-
vertently (uncritically) reproduces a phallocentrism that has long troubled Latinx
literature and art.11 And yet that blind spot constitutes an opportunity to reassert
Dussel’s insistence that transmodernism must be self-critical, an ever self-renovat-
ing project that—through the good offices of critics like Bachran—discovers and
tries to correct its internalized flaws. The remainder of Blues details the encounter
with, and ambivalent resistance to, Tezcatlipoca’s divine takeover.
Hogan intentionally blurs the lines between the technological and the super-
natural in the scene of Tezcatlipoca’s virtual resurrection. According to Beto, the
nanochip contains “the magic code for making gods come out of your computer,”
(13) and Blues situates that digital magic within a transtemporal ritualized space in
which Beto combines futuristic technology, designer drugs, and electronic dance
music with Aztec religious instruments (Tezcatlipoca’s namesake mirror, and a tep-
naztle, or small wooden drum) to accomplish his circuit-board sorcery (12–14).

11. Norma E. Cantú discusses the history of “phallocentric and often male-centered life-writing”
in Latinx literary history in “Memoir, Autobiography, Testimonio” (317). Besides the genres sig-
naled by Cantú in her essay for the The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature (2013), that male-
centered perspective can also be seen in early Latinx novels and poems.
16 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

In Blues, any hard and fast distinction, much less subordination, between fantasy
and sf becomes untenable. If anything, the classical hierarchy—evident in Suvin
and others—is reversed. When Hogan writes that Beto “reached up to the key-
board and set off the hard science, active ingredient of his magic,” it is, to return to
Clarke’s maxim, science that is ultimately explicable in magical terms (14). There
are copious examples throughout Blues of what Ramírez, a few years after the pub-
lication of the novel, would describe as the anticolonial gesture of Chicanx/Latinx
futurism to “merge” science and spirituality, technology and magic in an attempt
to radically transform—in the etymological sense of change at the roots of—the
epistemological structures of modern rationality.
The importance of this blending of genres and epistemologies can be bet-
ter understood if Blues is compared with novels by William Gibson and Nalo
Hopkinson in which the intermixing of science and the supernatural finally resolves
in favor of science (Gibson) and the supernatural (Hopkinson). Taken together,
these novels form a Todorovian triangle in which the aesthetic and ethical possi-
bilities and limitations of the uncanny (Gibson), the marvelous (Hopkinson), and
the fantastic (Hogan) are illustrated.12 For the novels of all three authors would
seem to demonstrate, and in similar ways, the “coalescence of technoscience and
magic” that Dani Cavallaro analyzes in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy (1984–1988) (54).
Their superficial similarities, however, conceal profound differences with more
than just literary consequences.
All three novelists incorporate seemingly supernatural beings into more or
less cyberpunk settings: the Loa in Gibson’s Sprawl novels, the Loa and Orishas
in Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, and Tezcatlipoca (among other briefly
witnessed gods) in Blues. But Gibson, as Cavallaro notes, periodically attempts
to rationalize his use of supernatural figures. In Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), for
instance, which is the final novel in the trilogy, Gibson has one of his more mem-
orable characters—the Finn—explain away “all those hoodoos ‘n’ shit” that have
seemingly haunted cyberspace and possessed its operators as manifestations of the
interfacing of two AIs of galactic complexity (308). If the Finn is to be believed, the
supernatural entities in the Sprawl novels are not supernatural at all, but are rather
intricately coded programs. (As opposed to the ambiguity on exactly this point
regarding Tezcatlipoca in Blues, Gibson definitively answers that the supernatu-
ral presences in Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive only seem to
be—but in the last instance are not in fact—magical.) Compare this incredible but
finally rational explanation of the Loa with their presence in Hopkinson’s Brown
Girl in the Ring.

12. Tzvetan Todorov discusses the “uncanny,” “marvelous,” and “fantastic” in The Fantastic: A
Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973). I address his key terms, from which I derive the figure
of a Todorovian triangle, at greater length below.
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 17

Figure 1. The Todorovian Uncanny-Marvelous-Fantastic Triangle. (A) The “uncanny”—Gibson’s

Sprawl trilogy—rational explanation; (B) the “marvelous”—Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring—
supernatural explanation; (C) the “fantastic”—Hogan’s Smoking Mirror Blues—“uncertainty” as to
whether rational or supernatural. (This figure is derived from The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to
a Literary Genre [1973], pp. 24–47.)

Brown Girl in the Ring is set in a postapocalyptic Toronto. The plot focuses
on an Afro-Caribbean woman named Ti-Jeanne who has been taught to com-
municate with and channel “the spirits. The loas. The orishas” (126). When, for
example, Ti-Jeanne is possessed by and changes into Prince of Cemetary (Eshu’s
sepulchral alter ego) she genuinely transforms. Hopkinson does not write in a way
that conforms to, or reinforces, western science. Instead, she imagines a world in
which African and Caribbean lifeways and ways of knowing have overcome and
re-created the legacy of colonial modernity with its hegemonic claims to truth.
In this sense—its many dystopic elements notwithstanding—Brown Girl depicts
the realization of utopia as accomplished sociohistorical transformation. Blues, by
comparison, situates itself in the position of possible, desired, but in nowise guar-
anteed social change.
If the Sprawl trilogy and Brown Girl in the Ring were mapped on a Todorovian
triangle, the former would be located closest to the “uncanny” vertex of Todorov’s
interpretive structure (fig. 1). The seemingly magical content of Gibson’s novels
ultimately has—or can be argued to have—a rational explanation. Hopkinson’s
novel, by contrast, would approach the “marvelous” vertex of that triangle. The
supernatural content of Brown Girl in the Ring has to be interpreted as genuinely
supernatural, or the novel will be grossly misunderstood. Hogan’s Smoking Mirror
Blues would occupy the third position, that of the “fantastic.” For Todorov, the fan-
tastic is marked by a fundamental “uncertainty” as to whether a text’s content is
18 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

finally explainable by rational or supernatural means (25). That uncertainty man-

ifests in the central question that Blues poses to its reader: “Is this supernatural?,”
a question that, along the lines of the fantastic, the novel refuses to definitively
answer.
The three points on this triangle have epistemological, ethical, and aes-
thetic significance. (Todorov mainly concerns himself with the latter.) Gibson’s
“uncanny” novels reinforce, even as in other ways they critique, a western, mod-
ern, late-capitalist narrative of technological progress based on a rational, scien-
tific understanding of the world. Hopkinson’s “marvelous” Brown Girl in the Ring
demands that the rational world alter and transform to admit the presence of spir-
itual and magical beings dismissed by the scientific (colonial) mind as Caribbean
superstitions. In this regard, the Caribbean-Canadian dimensions of Brown Girl
are vitally important, and Hopkinson creates in its pages a world in which the
periphery transforms the metropolitan center—Toronto, in this case (Frederick
13). The “uncertainty” of the fantastic Smoking Mirror Blues marks the novel as
a potential site of Dusselian transformation that will either lead beyond western
models of understanding or collapse back into them. In Hogan’s novel, the “eman-
cipatory imaginings” of Latinx futurism have reached the utopian threshold of a
genuinely new world.
Xochitl Echaurren focalizes the possibility of such a world as she travels from
Mexico to the USA to recover the nanochip that Beto stole from her. Through the
bus’s gritty and scratched window, she sees, blurring with the ghostly outline of
her face,
the new recombocultural trimili world: Mexico and America flowing
together again, the healing wound cut there by politicians from thousands
of miles away, that was the border, alive in the overgrowth of new worlds,
towns that grew up around the shopping malls and maquiladoras on both
sides, populated by people from all over—Nigerians, Siberians, Rwandans,
Bosnians, Timorese, Ohioans—and the new generation of mestizo recom-
bozoids of all colors. The Cosmic Race that is La Raza was alive and well
here in new, improved Mexamérica. It was all flashing by through her reflec-
tion. (55–56)

Like the (living) mural of Lady Tenochtitlán, who represents the intermingling
of lifeworlds and cultures in High Aztech, Xochitl’s image, her reflection, briefly
(feverishly) contains all the “new worlds” that erupt from the atom-like fission
of old worlds colliding. Hogan’s “recombocultural” borderlands, which pay hom-
age to Anzaldúa and José Vasconcelos, combine philosophical and literary allu-
sions with planetary populations in a mixed-up time-scape where past and future
are simultaneously present. Hogan’s imagery coalesces into a heterotopic vortex
whirling together “an ontological and epistemological alternative” (as Ramírez
has put it) to scientific—colonial, modern—definitions of subjectivity, time, and
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 19

technology. That “alternative” finds embodied—personified and deified—form

in Tezcatlipoca, incarnated symbol of recombo culture and Latinx utopian future
worlds in Smoking Mirror Blues.
An announcement blasts across the mediasphere that Tezcatlipoca, who goes
by the stage name “Smokey,” and who has become an overnight music and pop
culture icon, will speak to his listeners about a new song that will “transmorgrafy”
their lives (Blues 159). The title of that song doubles as the title of the novel, and
with it, Hogan adds his own riff to what Ralph Ellison calls the “ambiguity” of the
blues, their ability, that is, to combine antagonistic themes and emotions in musi-
cal transformations and syntheses (Ellison 70). For Hogan, the blues are “healing
magic” (Blues 205), and throughout the novel, healing—and magic—means met-
amorphosis. Change is what Smokey promises his audience—Tezcatlipoca was
the god of transformation after all. “You need me to sing the blues for you,” he tells
them,
to jolt you out of the prison you call yourself. To heal you. To allow you to
dance the ecstatic, chaotic dance of life. I could talk for hours about it, but
talk lacks the beat, the rhythm, the deep, dark magic to make these blues
work; so I made this song, with the help of my band, Los Tricksters. (160)

Tricksters bedevil the rational order of the worlds they inhabit, acting as agents
of unpredictable and, by hegemonic standards, irrational creation and change.13
Throughout Blues, Tezcatlipoca, whatever his phallocentric and heteronormative
flaws (flaws that, as Bachran has persuasively demonstrated, cannot be ignored),
nevertheless poses an ongoing challenge to the global systems of capital at work
within the novel. As such, the god figures crisis. He has the power to construct
(although it must be critiqued from within) Dussel’s transmodern utopia, that
is, a future that is truly “polifacética, híbrida, pos-colonial, pluralista, tolerante,
democrática … con espléndidas tradiciones milenarias” [polyfaceted, hybrid,
postcolonial, pluralist, tolerant … with splendid millennial traditions] (“Sistema-
mundo” 407). Such a future is anathema to the capitalist monster that Campo
Ramírez describes: a monster roaming the streets of El Lay devouring difference
and leaving unlimited commodities in its wake.
Many of the characters in the novel, knowingly or unknowingly, feed that
monster. They actively seek to thwart the realization of Tezcatlipoca’s “mondo
recombo,” a recombined world in which kaleidoscopic and vertiginously

13. As Winifred Morgan writes in The Trickster Figure in American Literature (2013), tricksters
across myriad literary and cultural traditions “transform their worlds whether those around them
want them to or not” (76). This can be seen—to give only two examples—in the Coyote tales in
Navajo Diné Bahane’ and in the katabatic descent of Hunahpu and Xbalanque in the Mayan Popol
Vuh; Hogan draws from these and many other stories in his rendering of Tezcatlipoca, “a master of
transformation” and a “trickster” (Milbrath 172).
20 Chiricú Journal, Vol. 5.1

multiplying narratives of identity would transcend globalization’s storyline of

apparent differentiation but ultimately self-reproducing sameness. In classic
cyberpunk fashion, governments and corporations, the media and criminals have
become indistinguishable from each other. No matter how superficially carniva-
leque and hallucinatory the setting of Blues may seem, then, and no matter how
drugged out and oversexed its characters, the diegetic infrastructure of the novel is
still a late capitalist one. The powers that be in Blues have a vested interest in per-
petuating the misinformation that “Smokey Espejo,” or Tezcatlipoca, “was a spon-
taneously generated artificial intelligence, a product,” that is, “of the mediasphere”
(203). A product in every sense of the word: produced by, and so containable—
subsumable—into existing paradigms of thought (There’s nothing inexplicable
here, folks!), and as a producible commodity that can be lucratively monetized
within extant socioeconomic structures. The explanation that the Global News
Net propagates throughout the world of Blues neatly confines Tezcatlipoca to a
Sprawl-like uncanny, where the god is nothing but an AI, and AIs are ultimately the
products (or byproducts) of human invention.
This systemic emphasis on rationally explaining (and so explaining away)
Tezcatlipoca is reemphasized at the level of plot. At the end of the novel, Xochitl
imprisons the priapic deity in a goddess-filled boudoir that turns out to be a cage
built from computer code (195–97, 202). Left at that, Texcatlipoca finally con-
tained by the very binary incantations he seemed to overcome at the beginning
of the novel, would be to leave Blues at the level of the uncanny. But Hogan twists
the narrative one final time, creating again a Möbius-like circuit in which sf and
fantasy, technology and magic continually intermix and combine with each other.
The last we see of the trickster god Tezcatlipoca, he is “eating” his way through
the VR cell, and his “laughter” is the final thing we hear in Blues (202, 209).
Tezcatlipoca’s laughter underscores the circular and circuitous nature of Hogan’s
novel. It ends where it begins, or rather, it concludes on the opposite side of where
it began: with the uncertainty of the fantastic and the utopian hope for transfor-
mation that inheres to the fantastic and is an essential component of Latinx futur-
ism. “The resolution of my stories,” writes Hogan, “comes through transformation”
(“Manifesto” 407), and transforming the world in ways that do not produce the
“old monsters,” capitalist or otherwise, of colonialism, racism, and sexism is the
ultimate goal of Afrofuturism and Latinx futurism (Merla-Watson and Olguín 32).
Blues has its limitations, as has been addressed by Bachran and others, but even
so, Blues should be read as forming an exemplary part of a transmodern utopian
project to create genuinely new worlds—worlds where magic and technology and
magic boil together in fantastic combinations, creating impossibly bright flashes
of light and casting unbelievably dark shadows in chiaroscuro displays beyond
rational explanation.
 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 21

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 Donohue / Sci-Fi Ain’t Nothing but Mojo Misspelled 23

Micah Donohue  is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern New Mexico University. His
work focuses on speculative fiction in Latinx, borderlands, and hemispheric American contexts.
His current book project explores how US and Mexican authors and filmmakers have turned to
speculative fiction to critique and imagine alternatives to cultural, sexual, economic, and ecological
forms of violence in the contemporary borderlands.
 Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.